The Powder Toy

Fast forward and rewind

Hi. I think that the abillity to fast forward and slow down and even rewind the simulation would be really handy. Too many times have I seen a save that apologises for being slow. Why not just increase the speed of the simulation? Have a fast forward, slow down, and rewind button made available. This could be an icon on the UI or a keyboard shortcut, maybe the < and > keys for rewind and fast forward and / for the slow motion. This would be extremely handy and awesome. Slow motion explosions and stickman fights would be wonderful, and pretty darn cool. Hopefully, this is a feasable idea that could be included into future versions of TPT

Unless the FPS counter in the top left corner is reading about 60, then the game is running as fast as it can, the speed is limited by how powerful your computer is. So no fast forward.

Rewind is not possible because most of what happens in TPT is not reversible. If you draw a pattern of DUST, then let it all fall to the bottom of the window, no record is kept of where each dust particle started and what path it took when falling. All the game knows after the dust falls is that there's a pile of dust at the bottom of the window, no memory of what happened before. The only thing that might be feasible is snapshots (e.g. saving once a minute, then you can go back to one of these autosaves).

Slow motion maybe, but you can probably do that already just by lowering the FPS cap (open the console and type tpt.setfpscap(5) ). You can also press f repeatedly to simulate one frame at a time.

@Dingolo(View Post)Skipping frames would require the particles to be updated, and fact is that the drawing part is not actually slow at all, what's slow is more than 150 elements each doing nearby searches and update functions and what not. One could always not draw a frame, but what does that provide aside from just not seeing a frame? I don't see a speed increase in just not drawing...

..Yeah. The issue with people saves being slow is pretty uniform as far as I've ever been able to tell. There's a few extremely characteristic causes people seem to be unaware of, and do nothing about for some reason.

1) First and most easy to notice, liquids are the laggiest thing there seems to be in this game as far as common substances go. All of the inner work done to calculate liquid movement behavior, even if it's sitting entirely still and surrounded by more liquid, is substantially worse than most mundane solids or gasses.

If a save is forced to use large quantities of liquid for some reason, then there's simply no way out of this. You can cheat, especially if it doesn't matter -where- the liquids are, if you set up a relaying system of portals that can store the liquids before being used, but they'll disappear when the save resets so these have limited use.

2) Arbitrary, or otherwise unnecessary use of particles, laggy or not. People building walls out of titanium for machines to keep air in when the machines are not destroyable, using 4px-thick pipes when 1px thick pipes are faster (since pipes are very active particles in comparison to say, brick), using random dirt layers for decoration, most of all. Any save with more than a few tens of thousands of particles is automatically not going to run at full speed on any ordinary computer, and most people don't appear to associate the number of particles they use with the speed of their saves.

If people's saves are laggy and it isn't water, tell them to use more walls. o_o That's pretty much it. The speed of the game is not really possible to change if it's not already hitting 60 fps.

Is why it kind of bugs me to death when someone makes this immensely awesome nuclear reactor

...And makes the buttons and display out of liquid crystal buttons that each have like 5000 particles and deco colors. And then an underground out of quartz/dust/clst/whatever that has like 100000 particles.

Having to delete random stuff to watch saves work is largely annoying.

We should all own supercomputers, so we can run TPT at 10000 FPS. That would fix things. But then we would complain about the lag in 3D TPT, which would contain 3D graphics and 3D motion controls. Be happy with what ya got! TPT runs pretty well as it is.

I strongly agree with you. We should be grateful that TPT is free, and doesn't cost, like, a tenner. You have the game, you got what you wanted. Although the slo-mo and FF would be handy. Right now, as I'm writing, I'm waiting for a machine to build a city automatically.